Monday, January 13, 2014

Room 237

Three lessons in Room
237 (dir. Rodney
Ascher), a 2012 documentary about people who see secret codes, hidden
messages, and unusual conspiracies encrypted in Stanley Kubrick’s 1981 film The Shining:

1. People need to
believe in extreme and bizarre narratives that prove the real world is merely a
shadow of a more sinister and dark reality. Not coincidentally, their ability
to identify and explain this hidden dimension that others do not see proves
their special intelligence.

2. Artists, certain
types of artists, have access to special forms of knowledge, and subtle means
of burying that knowledge in their art so that only the most capable and
intelligent can find it. The artist
cited in this film as similar to Kubrick is James Joyce whose book Finnegans Wake (1939) they find to be
noteworthy, mainly because almost no one can read it. Again, like Kubrick’s film, it is a work of
art whose meaning and value is accessible only to those smart enough to decipher
it. One of the people interviewed for the
documentary believes that every flaw and inconsistency in The Shining is an intentional act by Kubrick. He makes much of the fact that in one scene
the main character’s typewriter is gray and in another it is blue. If anything, this film makes me wonder
whether continuity is a problem in Kubrick films, and whether he was more
careless and capricious in the use of props and setting than he should have
been.

3. There are limits
to what interpretation can do (cf. Umberto Eco on the over-interpretation of
texts). Conversely, there are limits to
the messages and themes artists can place within their artistic works. We encounter in Room 237 some highly unusual theories that people claim to see worked
out in The Shining. One commentator thinks that it is an
allegorical narrative of Kubrick’s experience when he worked with NASA in the
late 1960s to create the videos that were shown as proof that the US landed on
the moon. (The commentator actually believes the moon landing occurred, but
that (for some reason) the moon landing videos were faked). A woman believes images of minotaurs are
hidden in the film. A man believes that
the film is about Kubrick’s obsession with the Holocaust. Another believes the film is about the
genocide against Native Americans (there’s more to this theory than the
others). All of these ideas are based on
“evidence” in the film, and on biographical evidence from Kubrick’s life and
his other films. But most of them do not
make sense--they’re illogical, they misconstrue the evidence, they stretch and
distort, all for the purpose of making the film fit and support a pet
theory. The film in effect becomes about
their theories rather than about what it really is about. Any random assortment of data can be made
into meaning.

Room 237 is
amusing throughout. It uses clips
from The Shining as well as other
Kubrick films and from films that have nothing to do with Kubrick.